Looking back at the Dev&IT-Pro Days: Day Two & Conclusion
As you I already told: day one ended in a cafe named Pallieter. After a “few beers” we headed for our hotel (in fact it was already day two, that's why I mention it again ;-). The second day of this event started with a keynote by David Chappell: "The Road to Longhorn". David is a very entertaining speaker, check out David Cumps' picture and you'll get the point. I think all presenters of the second day made an arrangement to mention at least 5 times per presentation “use managed code” in some way. In fact that was one of David's main messages: if you want to be able to migrate to Longhorn: use managed code.
Lester Madden is also a funny guy and that day he was one of the happiest persons in Belgium because it was it's last presentation in a long series. His talk about “The Longhorn User Experience” was amusing and intresting: he showed already the worst user interface you can make in XAML: a lot of colors, styles and animation (because of the Happy Hour in the Pallieter, I didn't like that demo: all the moving and rotating stuff...). And I agree with him; the Microsoft Office team probably won't hire him as a UI Designer. But the bottom line was: use managed code and Windows.Forms will still work with Longhorn.
The next person on stage was Clemens Vasters, who talked about “Indigo: The Longhorn Communications Architecture”. I've already heard a lot about Indigo, but during this presentation I finally had the famous Aha-Erlebnis. Thanks Clemens, you did a great job! Afterwards there was a private meeting organized by Gerd with both Clemens and David Chappell about SOA. I followed the entertaining discussion and at some point David mentioned that there's a paper discussing the ROI (2 years) of SOA in an EAI project. Like Patrick V I'm still looking for that document, as soon as I can get a hold of it, I'll post a link.
The last session of this event was “Whidbey: Get Ready For Longhorn” by Nigel Watling. Nigel showed off all the new cool stuff comming in Whidbey. Too bad he had a little problem with his Yukon server...
Conclusion
First of all congratulations to Gerd and his team that organised this event: thanks a lot! Secondly thanks to Alain for the invitation!
I liked the Dev & IT-Pro Days for mainly two reasons:
- Great content: there were a lot of intresting sessions not only about what's comming in the next years, but also about what's hot and new right now.
- Great people: it was both fun and intresting to meet again with the Belgian .NET Community. I'm looking forward to see you again at another event.